NDC-X Advisory Board fuels collaboration among travel industry players

Now, we’re excited to launch an initiative called our NDC-X Advisory Board. We have already celebrated one of these meetings with 10 travel seller customers, and soon we will be hosting further meetings, including a joint one with both our airline and travel seller NDC-X partners.

These dedicated face-to-face sessions will give all of us the opportunity to openly discuss NDC together. Topics such as the design, implementation, and development roadmap of Amadeus’ NDC-enabled solutions will be on the table for discussion. We will also be discussing gaps in current NDC implementations and working together to come up with solutions that realize the NDC goals of facilitating the selling and servicing of air for airlines and their distribution partners. Why are we doing this? We believe that collaboration is the key to success for NDC in the travel industry.

Participants in our first meeting represented agencies from all segments and all regions of our Travel Channels business: global TMCs Amex GBT, BCD, CWT, Egencia and Flight Centre; large online players Expedia, eDreams ODIGEO and Travix; the travel retail group Viajes El Corte Ingles and the integrated tourism group TUI. Two large retail agencies will be joining us for future sessions too.

Each of these leading travel brands has agreed to engage actively in our NDC-X program, and we want these sessions to provide answers and solutions in order to ensure NDC adoption.

We’ve already started working with all these customers, as well as our partner airlines in the NDC-X program. They are actively providing input to the design of the NDC-enabled versions of our Amadeus Web Services solution and our leading cloud-based user interface, Amadeus Selling Platform Connect. Both of these solutions are being enhanced to consume NDC content and will be ready for deployment in the first half of 2019.

As soon as we have the industrialized versions of our NDC-enabled solutions, we’ll start rolling them out to travel sellers and airlines around the world.

Collaborating with our customers during this NDC journey is fundamental for Amadeus. While we were defining our strategy for NDC, we went on a roadshow to speak with airlines and travel sellers to make sure we were all aligned and ready to take the journey together. Now with the advisory boards, we’ll be able to sit down regularly to discuss some of the main challenges and opportunities, and ensure NDC works for all.

Connecting with our customers in an open forum like this is all part of our wider mission to build a Live Travel Space where we all come together to create better journeys. To find out more about NDC-X, and what we’re doing with our airline and travel seller customers to ensure success, check out our dedicated NDC site.